With Practice
by K-promises-fall
Summary: Santana has been able to stop time for as long as she can remember. [Set in season 2, mentions of Bartie and one-sided Brittana]


Santana can stop time.

It's a secret she's kept all her life, for as long as she can remember; from the days when she'd play 'time tag' with her imaginary friend, Josey, and scare her mother by suddenly appearing behind her in the kitchen. She's understood her ability since the moment her dad explained to her what 'time' was and how there were some things you could only do at a certain time and other things you could do any time you wanted. She's also used and abused her powers for just as long: to cheat on tests, to steal away some extra hours to finish an assignment, to get out of fights and set up pranks. Once she had even pushed her ability to the limit and almost made it to the next state before her powers finally gave out.

Recently though, she has only really been using her powers for one thing – avoiding her best friend, Brittany Pierce.

Santana is a bitch, and she knows it. She's a bitch to her friends, she's a bitch to her enemies and she's a bitch to random passers-by who are unfortunate enough to catch her eyes. She is mean and rude and violent if she thinks it necessary. She doesn't hesitate to cut people down and she never apologizes when her words dig deeper than intended. She is a force to be reckoned with, a hailstorm blazing through the halls of McKinley High pelting everyone she passes with cold, hard ice for no reason at all beyond them simply being there to take it.

She's a bitch. People hate her. They give her nasty looks when her back is turned, wish misfortune on her when she's not within hearing range, whisper terrible rumours about her and call her every nasty word they can think of. People hate her – despise her even – and Santana doesn't much care because she hates herself too. So she continues being mean and a terror, a cruel dictator, the evil queen of every Disney story ever told, and she hates it and she hates herself and everyone hates her too.

Everyone except Brittany.

Santana is cantankerous and hurtful – a double edged blade that no one can wield because the hilt is broken. But with Brittany she minds her words, is considerate of her actions and is protective of her weaknesses. With Brittany her eyes soften and her tongue lies still and her ears open to listen to something other than the hateful diatribe that usually spills forth from her lips. With Brittany she is different. With Brittany she has always been different, and she's never stopped to consider why that is. Not until recently, that is.

Santana is a bitch, and even worse than that, she is a lesbian. She's had sex with countless guys, given blowjobs and handjobs and enjoyed it. She's only ever slept with one girl and it is so amazing an experience that she repeatedly crushes the voice in her head that tells her that it is wrong and disgusting and that she can officially add cheater to her list of titles. She crushes it again and again, and she was content to think of the sex as just something that would be expected of a slut like her, content to think that it meant nothing and that she only did it because she was tired of being left unsatisfied after sex with the guy of the week and girls knew best how to get other girls off. It was nothing; it meant nothing. But she was an idiot, because the girl was Brittany and with Brittany everything is different. Santana is a lesbian and that is just another reason for her to hate herself.

She's a cold-hearted bitch and a lesbian in love with her best friend and now she can also add that she is a coward.

She's been so many terrible things but it's her cowardice that drove Brittany away from her, and it's her cowardice that keeps her away from Brittany. So she stops time when she and Brittany reach school within seconds of each other so she can get ahead of her and disappear into the halls. She stops time when she sees Brittany's boyfriend, Artie, rolling down the halls in his wheelchair (and can you believe it, Santana is so pathetic that Brittany would choose a cripple over her) because Brittany is sure to be nearby and even if she isn't, seeing him makes her mouth go dry and her chest ache and her self-loathing intensify. She stops time in glee when Brittany moves to sit in his lap, kiss his cheeks or lips, smile at him, laugh at a joke he made, hold his hand. She stops time, just for a little while so she can catch her breath and close her eyes and convince herself that she doesn't have a heart left to break.

She stops time because time is what she needs. It's the only thing that keeps her going and it's all she can do to keep attending her classes without drowning in the pit she had dug herself into and filled with her own poison.

She stops time again and again and again until the days last 36 hours instead of 24 and she can spend half a day curled up in her bed instead of going to school. She stops time until she can hear the world itself crying out at her to stop, to let time flow as it was meant to. She stops time because that is how she hides. She stops time so no one notices that she's all broken inside. She stops time because it's the only way she can allow herself to not live.

* * *

Santana perfected her ability to freeze time when she was seventeen. Now she works at an agency called SHIELD and persons with abilities of their own – abilities they struggle to control – ask her how she does it. How she keeps herself from stopping time with every sneeze, every spike of pain, every unintentional twitch of her fingers. They ask her how she manages to make it do what she wants when she wants and what they need to do so that their powers do the same.

When they ask, Santana thinks back to when she was seventeen and hurting and alone and scared. She thinks back to when she first allowed the greatest thing in her life to slip from between her fingers. She goes back in time before she comes forward, and she smiles at their nervous, tired, stressed out faces and tells them how she managed to do it.

"With practice."


End file.
